Page 1 of Curse in the Quarter (Bourbon Street Shadows #1)

T he gas lamps cast dancing shadows along Royal Street as Bastien walked beside Delia through the humid November night.

Their footsteps echoed against cobblestones still damp from the afternoon rain, and the air carried the mingled scents of jasmine, coffee, and the Mississippi River that wound its way through the heart of the city like an ancient serpent.

“You’re unusually quiet tonight,” Delia observed, her gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm. “Even for my mysterious guardian.”

Bastien’s fingers tightened imperceptibly around the small velvet box in his coat pocket. Three months he’d carried it, waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect words. Tonight felt different—charged with possibility and the kind of hope that made even a fallen angel believe in second chances.

“Perhaps I’m simply enjoying the silence,” he replied, though his voice carried none of its usual steady confidence. “It’s not often we have the Quarter to ourselves.”

She laughed, the sound bright as cathedral bells.

“Liar . You’re planning something. I can always tell when your mind is working through possibilities.

” Her brown eyes sparkled with mischief in the lamplight.

“You get this little crease right here.” She reached up with her free hand to touch the space between his brows.

The gesture was casual, intimate, born of months of such small familiarities. Yet it stopped him in his tracks. How could she know him so well when she didn’t know him at all? When the truth of what he was remained locked behind careful lies and half-spoken explanations?

“Delia.” Her name came out rougher than he intended.

“Yes?”

“What would you say if I told you there were things about me that might . . . surprise you?”

They had stopped beneath a wrought iron balcony draped with Spanish moss.

The boarding house where she lived was still two blocks away, but Bastien found himself reluctant to continue.

Once they reached her door, she would climb those narrow stairs to her small room, and he would walk alone through the empty streets as he had for decades before her.

“I would say that I already know you’re not entirely human,” she said simply.

The words hit him like cold water. His hand fell away from his pocket, and for a moment, the careful masks he wore threatened to slip entirely.

“Delia—”

“Oh, don’t look so stricken.” She stepped closer, her skirts rustling against the cobblestones. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed? The way you appear at precisely the moment I need you. How you seem to know things you shouldn’t know? How you never age, never change, while months pass around us? ”

“Some truths are too dangerous,” he managed.

“And some truths,” she countered, “are the only things that make life worth living.”

Her hands found his face, drawing him down until their foreheads nearly touched. In the amber glow of the gas lamp, she looked like something from a Renaissance painting—all golden light and dark shadows, beautiful and ephemeral and utterly human.

“I don’t need to understand everything about you to know that I love you,” she whispered.

“I’ve loved you since that first night when you found me lost in the fog near the cathedral.

I loved you when you sat with me through my fever last winter, when you brought me books you claimed to have ‘found’ but I know you bought especially for me.

I love the way you listen to my terrible piano playing as if it were opera, and how you always know exactly what to say when the world feels too large and too cruel. ”

The ring box felt impossibly heavy in his pocket. This moment—this perfect, honest moment—was everything he’d dreamed of. All he had to do was speak.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he began.

But before he could continue, she had begun to hum.

The melody was simple, barely more than a handful of notes, but it wrapped around his heart like silk cord.

She hummed it often while she worked, while she walked, while she sat reading by her window.

It was uniquely hers—a little unconscious song that seemed to rise from some deep well of contentment.

“That tune,” he said, momentarily derailed. “Where did you learn it?”

“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “I’ve always known it, I think. My mother used to say I hummed it even as a baby.” Her expression grew thoughtful. “Strange. I never told you that before, did I?”

“No,” he said quietly. “You didn’t.”

But he would remember it forever. Every note, every gentle rise and fall of her voice. It would follow him through decades, through other cities and another life, an echo of this moment when everything seemed possible.

They resumed walking, her humming trailing behind them like a benediction.

The boarding house came into view—a narrow three-story building squeezed between a bakery and a milliner’s shop.

Mrs. Thibodeau kept respectable rooms for working women, and Delia’s was on the second floor, facing the courtyard.

“Will you come up for coffee?” she asked as they reached the front steps. “Mrs. Thibodeau is visiting her sister in Metairie. We’d have the parlor to ourselves.”

The invitation was carefully casual, but Bastien heard the deeper question beneath it. They had been building toward this moment for months—the space between courtship and complete surrender, between the love they’d acknowledged and the future they’d only dared to dream of.

“Delia.” He stopped her with a gentle hand on her wrist. “Before we . . . there’s something you should know about me. Something important.”

She turned to face him fully, her expression serious now. “Tell me.”

“I’m not what I appear to be. My nature, my past?—”

“Your nature is to protect people who need protecting,” she interrupted. “Your past brought you to me. Everything else is just details.”

“What if the details matter? What if they change how you see everything between us?”

She considered this, her head tilted slightly to one side. In the distance, a clock tower chimed the hour—ten o’clock. Late enough that the streets were nearly empty, early enough that the night still held promise.

“Then we’ll face that when it comes,” she said finally. “But Bastien, I need you to understand something. Whatever you think you need to confess, whatever darkness you imagine you carry—it doesn’t change what I feel. It doesn’t change what we are to each other.”

The certainty in her voice nearly undid him. She was offering him exactly what he’d wanted without even knowing the true weight of what she was accepting. A fallen angel’s love came with complications that could span lifetimes, with dangers she couldn’t begin to imagine.

But looking at her face in the lamplight—seeing the trust and affection and quiet determination there—he found himself believing that perhaps this time could be different. Perhaps this time, love might be enough.

“Tomorrow,” he said, his voice steadier now. “Come to the cathedral after your work. I’ll tell you everything then. And I’ll ask you something I should have asked months ago.”

“Ask me now.”

“Tomorrow.”

She smiled, accepting the delay with grace.

“Very well. Tomorrow, then.” She stepped closer, her hands finding his face as she drew him down to her.

Their lips met in a kiss that held all the promise of tomorrow—deep, lingering, filled with the certainty of love freely given and completely returned.

When they finally parted, her eyes were bright with unshed tears of happiness. “Good night, my mysterious guardian.”

“Good night, my love.”

She climbed the stairs to the boarding house door, her skirts swaying gently. At the threshold, she turned back to him with that same bright smile.

“Tomorrow,” she said, and began to hum again—that same lovely, unconscious melody.

He stood there long after she’d gone inside, long after the light appeared in her second-floor window and then went dark again. The ring box remained in his pocket, the proposal unspoken, but for the first time in as long as he could remember, Bastien felt something approaching peace.

Tomorrow, he would tell her everything.

Tomorrow, he would ask her to be his wife, to bind her life to his in ways that would transcend human understanding. Both human and ethereal promise in one.

Tomorrow, they would begin planning a future that seemed, in this moment, as bright as the gas lamps lining the Quarter streets.

He was still standing there, lost in dreams of tomorrow, when the first wave of mystical disturbance hit him.

It began as a whisper along his senses—the faint taste of copper and ozone, the subtle wrongness that meant someone, somewhere, was meddling with forces beyond their understanding.

For a moment, he dismissed it as background noise.

New Orleans was always alive with small magics, tiny rituals performed by practitioners who thought they understood the powers they invoked.

But this was different.

Older.

Stronger.

And growing.

The second wave hit him harder, physically and strong enough that he staggered against the lamppost. This wasn’t the tentative magic of local practitioners. This was ancient power, forbidden knowledge, the kind of ritual that should have been lost centuries ago.

Anima Binding or Soul-tethering as some called it. Someone was attempting to bind spirits across lifetimes, to forge connections that transcended death itself.

Horror bloomed in his chest as understanding dawned. The ritual was massive in scope, designed to affect multiple subjects across a wide area. And at the heart of the working, he could sense the location of the primary focus.

The Saenger Theatre district. Four blocks from where he stood.

Two blocks from Delia’s boarding house.

“No.” The word came out as barely a whisper.